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Flip A Coin To Get Little Kids To Eat Dinner

If you have a small child, you probably have some kind of food battle happening at your house. Whether they don’t want to sit still long enough to eat, they won’t eat THAT, or they don’t want to eat anything, it makes meal time a challenge. Parents come up with their own ways to deal with it, but a Redditor may have figured out the best hack yet.

Reddit user u/jlfern came up with this simple way to get their four-year-old daughter to eat: teaching her to flip a coin. Their post explains:

“Heads—she has a bite of broccoli; Tails—she has a bite of quesadilla. It’s the first time she’s finished her dinner in months. I won every flip of the coin.”

We’re guessing the key here is letting the kid flip the coin themselves because the game is what keeps them interested, not the broccoli. And it won’t work with every kid every time, but these other ideas from Reddit commenters and Lifehacker staff may do the trick as well.

-Roll the dice (literally) — whatever number they roll, that’s how many bites they have to take.

-Tell them they have to take five more bites and count along out loud with them, just keep going after five until the plate is empty.

-Let their age determine how many more bites they have to eat.

-Form the bites into a row or fun shape and count them off while they eat.

-Try the “take at least one bite before you say ‘no thank you’” rule. It won’t help them eat a lot of something, but it can stop fights over at least trying something new.